You sound, she said, like I do when I’m trying to convince someone to do something I really don’t want them to do.

Later I thought, well, she’s young and lively, and should go and enjoy herself among her peers, and I’m quoting Suzie of course.

She asked me to pick her up after the party (why hasn’t she called yet?) and I said sure, and she said that’s great, because she really hates leaving a party by herself and feeling so lonely, and I thought yeah, that’s why I hated parties, because they made me feel so lonely. It was like that when I was a kid, and it was like that when Suz was telling me that sure, she doesn’t mind if I go out and hang out with “my peers”, because those kids made me feel all old and just as lonely as when they were really my age.

So I took her to the party and felt jealous. And later, coming in to wait for her call, I realized that I hate her a bit for making me feel back in high school again, shut out of the cool kids’ party.

But I thought of dropping her off at the party, twenty minutes before, and how, in her costume ball dress and loose hair, uncut since her teens, she didn’t look like she was heading to some decadent and debauched orgy, she looked like a kid, heading for her class party, hesitant and lost as I felt inside.

Now as much as I anticipate a week-long Rilstone rant, culminating, I presume, with a post-premiere review, my interest flaggs somewhat when I think that I’ll probably have no idea what he’s talking about until, well, whenever I get to see the series, which, not being British or a torrenting person, is probably never.

I got a comment from the developer of the GreaseMonkey Textile Javascript script I mentioned, which encouraged me to (a) actually try to convert a few entries and (b) once I discovered it was making a bit of a mess of it, look at the code and fix the bug that was giving me the problem.

Apparently, my use of parentheses was confusing a regular expression used to convert textile-style “links” into HTML links.

I replaced a match for “a run of characters between parentheses” with a match for “a run of character that aren’t parentheses between parentheses”.

Interestingly through the comments on the Textile Javascript page I found the blog of someone using Movable Type who rejected the Javascript version in favour of the server-side MT-Textile. This way makes sense – you can keep editing the textile-formatted entry, which the Javascript version simply replaces (and destroys), because it stays saved in the database, and gets converted to HTML only when you publish. Funnily enough, I find the Javascript version more useful, because I’ve moved my entries to a different content management system, and lost the meta-data about how to format them.
The point being that the best way to store blog entries is in HTML format, which is portable across CMS systems. (I know WordPress has a textile plug-in or rather two, but who knows if my next CMS will have one?)